Amazon Pays $650 Million For Nuclear-Powered Data Center 68
Michelle Lewis reports via Electrek: One of the US's largest nuclear power plants will directly power cloud service provider Amazon Web Services' new data center. Power provider Talen Energy sold its data center campus, Cumulus Data Assets, to Amazon Web Services for $650 million. Amazon will develop an up to 960-megawatt (MW) data center at the Salem Township site in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. The 1,200-acre campus is directly powered by an adjacent 2.5 gigawatt (GW) nuclear power station also owned by Talen Energy.
The 1,075-acre Susquehanna Steam Electric Station is the sixth-largest nuclear power plant in the US. It's been online since 1983 and produces 63 million kilowatt hours per day. The plant has two General Electric boiling water reactors within a Mark II containment building that are licensed through 2042 and 2044. According to Talen Energy's investor presentation, it will supply fixed-price nuclear power to Amazon's new data center as it's built. Amazon has minimum contractual power commitments that ramp up in 120 MW increments over several years. The cloud service giant has a one-time option to cap commitments at 480 MW and two 10-year extension options tied to nuclear license renewals.
The 1,075-acre Susquehanna Steam Electric Station is the sixth-largest nuclear power plant in the US. It's been online since 1983 and produces 63 million kilowatt hours per day. The plant has two General Electric boiling water reactors within a Mark II containment building that are licensed through 2042 and 2044. According to Talen Energy's investor presentation, it will supply fixed-price nuclear power to Amazon's new data center as it's built. Amazon has minimum contractual power commitments that ramp up in 120 MW increments over several years. The cloud service giant has a one-time option to cap commitments at 480 MW and two 10-year extension options tied to nuclear license renewals.
Wooo, what is wrong with this picture? (Score:1)
Anybody?
America’s 2024 version of SSDD. (Score:4, Funny)
Anybody?
*sucks in deep breath*
Not-a-monopoly mega-corp Donor Class Platinum member speedruns 20+ years of taxpayer funded NIMBY riddled red tape to piggyback on existing nuclear site, hand over capitalist-blood money squeezed fresh from the tears and assets of every business they’ve consumed over the last decade to buy their “fair” share of overall capacity, while never threatening to consume more or become the power priority or metric by which everyone else’s kilowatt hour is pre-judged and inflated. And if you refuse, wellthat’s a nice city/town/state you’ve got there Sure would be a shame if Amazon blacklisted it. From every service.
Meh, what’s to report other than SSDD? What can we Americans say other than this is our America now.. Yeah. It is pretty bad. That’s one fucking company.
You get what you vote for in a Democracy. Start small, win big, and stop assuming the fight starts with the US President. In spite of more word salads than Olive Garden could serve, this Administration has conveyed one thing crystal clear to the American People; The capacity or capability of our highest positions, are quite irrelevant beyond feeding the political warmongering we Americans don’t need, and ultimately pay for.
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I'd have modded you up if my points hadn't expired.
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...this Administration has conveyed one thing crystal clear to the American People; The capacity or capability of our highest positions, are quite irrelevant beyond feeding the political warmongering we Americans donâ(TM)t need, and ultimately pay for.
And how is this Administration is different from the last five or so?
Re: Wooo, what is wrong with this picture? (Score:2, Insightful)
Nothing, absolutely nothing. Free energy for the next 100 years. Zero emissions datacenter. No heavy metal laced solar panels or plastic resin wind turbines that provide a fraction of the power needs of their datacenter.
This is a model anyone should follow and obviously very cheap too, a few million for a nuke reactor that can supply the entire surrounding area with power.
Re: Wooo, what is wrong with this picture? (Score:4, Funny)
And by free you mean excluding the cost to either strip the mountain or bore into it to get at the ore using fossil fuel vehicles, destroying the land in the process. Then using fossil fuels to process the ore, spewing pollutants into the air. Then building the nuclear plant by destroying more land using more fossil fuel vehicles and releasing tons of CO2 into the air through the poured concrete, not to mention everything involved to produce the steel used in construction.
Once the plant is running you now have various types of nuclear waste to contend with. Some can be sent to specified land fills while the more toxic variety needs to be housed in specialized containers and either buried in a "shallow" hole, or in holes bored up to a kilometer in depth [world-nuclear.org], with all the attendant waste produced to create either variety, thus taking away more land and resources. For the most toxic of waste, we have to safely store the thousands of tons of nuclear waste [scientificamerican.com] we generate each year for at least 1 million years, hoping it doesn't break containment and contaminate ground water or cause other problems.
But aside from all of that, yes, totally free. Just like solar power.
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And by free you mean excluding the cost to either strip the mountain or bore into it to get at the ore using fossil fuel vehicles, destroying the land in the process.
Because renewable energy systems are built out of air and wishes and use no ore whatsoever. Nuclear power plants being somewhat small per joule generated compared to most renewable systems end up using substantially less steel and concrete overall.
Re: Wooo, what is wrong with this picture? (Score:2)
Solar and wind both have less ecological impact than nuclear per Wh, cradle to grave. You somehow managed to pretend this wasn't true.
Only cradle to grave measurements matter, period.
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Solar and wind both have less ecological impact than nuclear per Wh, cradle to grave. You somehow managed to pretend this wasn't true.
All the figures I've seen indicate the opposite, with them all being close.
Which since you're clearly massively lying about because you've decided to act like an utter knobcheese and fling invective when someone disagrees with you. Seriously if you're just going to lean on personal attacks, at least do it properly :)
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Your comment deserves modding up; but "Funny" as the first mod? WTF?
And by free you mean excluding the cost to either strip the mountain or bore into it to get at the ore using fossil fuel vehicles, destroying the land in the process. Then using fossil fuels to process the ore, spewing pollutants into the air. Then building the nuclear plant by destroying more land using more fossil fuel vehicles and releasing tons of CO2 into the air through the poured concrete, not to mention everything involved to produce the steel used in construction.
And all of that in support of a company which is one of the worst employers in the free world, and whose most public-facing function - shopping - results in uncounted tons of returned goods being sent to landfill. Not to mention the web services which the nuclear plant will power; these consume criminal amounts of energy in support of advertising, social media, propaganda, privacy rape, and probably dozens more activities aimed at increasin
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Your comment deserves modding up; but "Funny" as the first mod? WTF?
We live in a world where even feminists cannot tell you what a “woman” is anymore. When Common F. Sense hits people over and over with proven facts and it bounces off like bullets hitting Superman, the fuck else you gonna do but laugh?
You’d go insane otherwise.
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Well, I supposed we could go back
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Living like that, although possible, is a lot dirtier and even worse for the environment. See China/India/Africa.
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Indeed. The nuclear fanatics do not have working brains.
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You can pick up uranium and other necessary ores simply pick them up off the ground in places like Utah. Yes the entire Grand Canyon area is mildly radioactive.
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You seriously expect that nuclear plant to last another 100 years?
Depending on where you start counting (start or build or end of commissioning), it's already over 40 or 50 years old.
The BWR-4 reactor design dates from 1966, which is based on the original BWR from 1957. Even industry shills World Nuclear Association only claim a typical 60 year lifespan for those things.
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The nuclear fanatics are deeply stupid and deep in denial. The only way they can come up with fantasies like this one. Basically after something like 60 years, a nuke begins to crumble and gets horrendous expensive to keep running. The Swiss, for example, recently shut down an old nuke permanently without political pressure and with several years of operational permissions, because the owner did not want to run it anymore. "No economic perspective" was the verdict. This was a nuke that was built, up and run
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Basically after something like 60 years, a nuke begins to crumble and gets horrendous expensive to keep running.
Yes, 60 year old anything tends to fit that description. (ps, 20 year old wind turbines are turning out to be a disproportionate environmental problem) But political opposition kept many of the old (specifically BWR) reactors running instead of being replaced with modern designs. Any sane person would prefer new good designs over old bad designs, but when no new builds is the goal at any cost, and then even shut down good designs at any cost, bad things happen. Let's analyze what's the no-nuke-at-any-cost p
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ps, and most nuclear reactors are not breeder reactors, so they don't produce anything usable in a bomb. But if you're a fan of Thorium reactors, have at it, I'd like that too.
That happens to be untrue.
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There now is an investment rush to bring old plants back online.... do not think the short term CA history will be the USA plan.
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The hard limit on the lifetime of the plant is usually the reactor vessel. The containment vessel also degrades.
Then you have necessary safety upgrades that become too costly.
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Yes, eventually everything decays to lead but that will take hundreds if not thousands of years. There is no evidence that this particular reactor is anywhere near its functional lifetime, Amazon wouldn't buy it if it were not good for at least the next 20-30 years (the lifespan of the datacenter itself). All the "industry" estimates are very conservative when it comes to these things, everything about a nuclear reactor is over-engineered, but reactors, cyclotrons and other nuclear-adjacent systems that wer
Re: Wooo, what is wrong with this picture? (Score:2)
No, nobody is talking about decaying to lead, and you either know that and are being typically disingenuous or don't and have nothing of value to add to this conversation.
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There is no need to mothball a nuclear plant unless it has shown serious cracks. No nuclear plant in the world is to the point where that is happening, concrete has a lifespan that should last 300+ years, perhaps even thousands. The pipes etc will eventually be replaced, but that's just regular maintenance (and at some point resembles the ship of Theseus). But the structure and containment area itself is good for a long time.
Re: Wooo, what is wrong with this picture? (Score:2)
The main containment vessel has a lifespan, we have already examined decommissioned reactors and found that we only didn't have catastrophic failures because of luck, so your opinion on whether they are secure is laughably wrong.
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And in every one of those cases, real professionals say those 'inspectors' are just fear mongering.
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100 years? Cool. I gather you envision a big firework at the end with some free glowing-in-the-dark afterwards. Oh, and economic collapse, because nuclear is fact becoming the most expensive mainstream way to generate electricity and that does _not_ take accident cost into account.
At this time, only the deeply stupid still promote nukes. You qualify,.
Re:Wooo, what is wrong with this picture? (Score:5, Informative)
Computing power (Score:2)
This gives a new meaning to the phrase "computing power". They are committing to using at least 480MW of power - that is...incredible.
There was another discussion about feeding waste heat from data centers into district heating. AFAIK, that's pretty unknown in the US, but this is an excellent example of where that would make sense. A 480MW data center is, in the end, going to generate 480MW of waste heat. That's enough to cover the heating needs of a small city.
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kWh/day considered nonsense (Score:3, Interesting)
"63 million kilowatt hours per day" -- oh boy. This suggests that the reactor can distribute those kWh energy parcels across the day as required. Surprise: it can't do that.
Also, 63/24 is 2.625, so one of these numbers is inaccurate.
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"As required" in the case of a data center means "flat continuous power consumption"
Datacentres do not have flat continuous power consumption. Their loads vary greatly.
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False. Large datacenters and distributed virtualization platforms modulate cycle availability to maintain relatively constant power consumption. Lower priority tasks are often paused, or given higher priority, depending upon the overall power load.
There is a lot of science thrown at load modulation because of the way power is billed. For commercial and industrial customers, electricity is billed based on both average and peak demand, and the latter is tremendously more expensive than the former, so it is im
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False again. Power consumption is not constant. Sure it is attempted to be kept constant by load balancing but datacentres provide regional services and they do swing loads between day and night. They are not universally fungible resources dispatchable across the world. You'd be pretty pissed if you had such varying latency due to load balancing systems.
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You'd be pretty pissed if you had such varying latency due to load balancing systems.
Not if I was doing Bitcoin mining or LLM training. In fact, I'd be happy if I could get cheaper energy in exchange for throttling my processing to level the load on the power plant next door.
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Presumably the whole data centre is actually connected to the grid as well, for times when the nuclear power plant is offline. It just happens to be close by.
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Which specific words there suggest to you that this is anything other than a base load power plant?
Re:kWh/day considered nonsense (Score:5, Informative)
"63 million kilowatt hours per day" -- oh boy. This suggests that the reactor can distribute those kWh energy parcels across the day as required. Surprise: it can't do that.
Also, 63/24 is 2.625, so one of these numbers is inaccurate.
SSES produces up to 63 million KWH/day; TFA even points out AWS is only planning to use a fraction of the 2 units' output capacity. AWS has simply gotten a long term contract for power. Talen will simply continue to base load the plant and sell power to other users; the deal is no different than had AWS bought options on gas to secure a price for their power needs. But, since it is nuclear...
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It's interesting that they are willing to contract for this power. I wonder how much they are paying for it.
In Spain electricity is down to â2/MWh, compared to â67 from French nuclear. While nuclear tends to be cheaper in the US, a quick google suggests it's around â30/MWh on average. I guess Microsoft prefers a stable price, rather than paying the market rate for it. That probably suits the nuclear plant too, even if it is lower than what they can get on the market sometimes.
https://www.bnnb [bnnbloomberg.ca]
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Nuclear companies (Score:2)
Matter of time before these tech giants operate their own nuclear power plants. They will need the Uranium-235 anyway for their weapons programmes for when they secede from the US.
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Matter of time before these tech giants operate their own nuclear power plants. They will need the Uranium-235 anyway for their weapons programmes for when they secede from the US.
Secede from the US? Why would they secede from something in which they already effectively have majority ownership?
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Side business? (Score:2)
They'll need to buy enriched uranium, or buy uranium and enrich it themselves. But maybe the cost can be offset by selling tritium from the moderator pools. Hydrogen bombs need theirs to be replenished periodically.
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They'll need to buy enriched uranium, or buy uranium and enrich it themselves. But maybe the cost can be offset by selling tritium from the moderator pools. Hydrogen bombs need theirs to be replenished periodically.
Uh, this is Bezos’ baby we’re talking about here. I’m quite certain there’s a pool buried beneath Antarctica somewhere being heated by nuclear reactors for the purposes of keeping the laser-strapped sharks comfy.
Crazy billionaires and their New World Order parties..
stupid dystopia (Score:2)
These aren't breeder reactors, are they? 'cause capitalists with nukes would probably be bad...
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You're describing the Military-Industrial Complex.
Literally capitalists building nukes.
Maybe they delivered them all, maybe a few are reserved for a Samson Option.
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By a mild amount of rounding to make for more "friendly" sounding numbers? Granted I'd probably have also rounded 63 to 60 for convenience, or if attached to two significant figures would have done 2.6 instead of 2.5 (if those numbers are accurate).
I think it's weird to get pedantic over a 5% discrepancy in PR figures.
2.5 gigawatts (Score:2)
That's more that twice 1.21 gigawatts.
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That's more that twice 1.21 gigawatts.
Only if you pronounce it "jiggawatts".
Cancer for all Amazon employees! (Score:1)
Then Amazon sends that person to work in another warehouse and they walk around spewing all that collected radiation, infecting other innocent Amazon employees.
Those people should seek immediate relief from a spinal care specialist such as a chiropractor. A chiropractor will gently adjust the spine so the body be
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The 1950's called. They want their paranoid, alarmist bullshit back.
Ah yes. The 1950’s. Back when doctors were pimping cigarettes, because all that alarmist bullshit about cancer was just alarmist bullshit, right?
Yes, tell me more about paranoia and Government while I get you a tall glass of Flint water Presidents pretend to drink..
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Seriously dude? A chiro, binspamming here on Slashdot? Perhaps you'd like to push some homeopathic tinctures too - maybe even offer ozone treatments, copper bracelets for arthritis, psychic surgeries... You could be a one-stop pseudo-science and superstition shop.
Nuclear Cloud (Score:3, Funny)
Two words I don't want to hear in the same sentence.
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